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[Frontispiece: Rupert Brooke 1913]

Letters from America

by Rupert Brooke.

With a Preface by Henry James

NOTE

The author started in May 1913 on a journey to the United States,
Canada, and the South Seas, from which he returned next year at the
beginning of June. The first thirteen chapters of this book were written
as letters to the Westminster Gazette . He would probably not have
republished them in their present form, as he intended to write a longer
book on his travels; but they are now printed with only the correction
of a few evident slips.

The two remaining chapters appeared in the New Statesman , soon
after the outbreak of war.

Thanks are due to the Editors who have allowed the republication of the
articles.

E. M.

CONTENTS

Note

RUPERT BROOKE: by Henry James

LETTERS FROM AMERICA

I. Arrival

II. New York

III. New York ( continued )

IV. Boston and Harvard

V. Montreal and Ottawa

VI. Quebec and the Saguenay

VII. Ontario

VIII. Niagara Falls

IX. To Winnipeg

X. Outside

XI. The Prairies

XII. The Indians

XIII. The Rockies

XIV. Some Niggers

An Unusual Young Man

RUPERT BROOKE: by Henry James

Nothing more generally or more recurrently solicits us, in the light of
literature, I think, than the interest of our learning how the poet, the
true poet, and above all the particular one with whom we may for the
moment be concerned, has come into his estate, asserted and preserved
his identity, worked out his question of sticking to that and to nothing
else; and has so been able to reach us and touch us as a poet, in
spite of the accidents and dangers that must have beset this course. The
chances and changes, the personal history of any absolute genius, draw
us to watch his adventure with curiosity and inquiry, lead us on to win
more of his secret and borrow more of his experience (I mean, needless
to say, when we are at all critically minded); but there is something in
the clear safe arrival of the poetic nature, in a given case, at the
point of its free and happy exercise, that provokes, if not the cold
impulse to challenge or cross question it, at least the need of
understanding so far as possible how, in a world in which difficulty and
disaster are frequent, the most wavering and flickering of all fine
flames has escaped extinction. We go back, we help ourselves to hang
about the attestation of the first spark of the flame, and like to
indulge in a fond notation of such facts as that of the air in which it
was kindled and insisted on proceeding, or yet perhaps failed to
proceed, to a larger combustion, and the draughts, blowing about the
world, that were either, as may have happened, to quicken its native
force or perhaps to extinguish it in a gust of undue violence. It is
naturally when the poet has emerged unmistakeably clear, or has at a
happy moment of his story seemed likely to, that our attention and our
suspense in the matter are most intimately engaged; and we are at any
rate in general beset by the impression and haunted by the observed law,
that the growth and the triumph of the faculty at its finest have been
positively in proportion to certain rigours of circumstance.

It is doubtless not indeed so much that this appearance has been
inveterate as that the quality of genius in fact associated with it is
apt to strike us as the clearest we know. We think of Dante in harassed
exile, of Shakespeare under sordidly professional stress, of Milton in
exasperated exposure and material darkness; we think of Burns and
Chatterton, and Keats and Shelley and Coleridge, we think of Leopardi
and Musset and Emily Bronte and Walt Whitman, as it is open to us surely
to think even of Wordsworth, so harshly conditioned by his spareness and
bareness and bleakness all this in reference to the voices that have
most proved their command of the ear of time, and with the various
examples added of those claiming, or at best enjoying, but the slighter
attention; and their office thus mainly affects us as that of showing in
how jostled, how frequently arrested and all but defeated a hand, the
torch could still be carried... Continue reading book >>